The Robots are Taking Our Jobs!! (But in a Good Way)

schedule 7 months ago

45 Mins

Talk

Beginner

Using Javascript, Ruby, Appium, and some off-the-shelf hardware, we have built our own credit card swiping robot; it has opened up a plethora of testing possibilities for our Register app.

Shopkeep is a point of sale software company. We use Appium for testing our iOS and Android apps. One of the biggest limitations of our automation suite was that we were unable to test our hardware, including the credit card readers our mobile app interfaces with.

To overcome this limitation, we came up with a solution to create a simple robot and attach it to a web endpoint. Making simple HTTP post requests, our credit card swiping robot can now swipe cards on the credit card reader. After going through certain iterations in the development of this prototype, we are now creating robots for testing chip card insertion, as well as contactless/NFC based transactions.

This talk will cover the different components that this robot is made up of. We will also look at the challenges we faced and how we integrated this solution to our Appium automation suite. Our talk aims to inspire you to think of what real, physical objects you can test using a similar solution.